Project 1999 - Item Reimbursement Delays

Hello friends,

Many of you have inquired about the status of your pending item reimbursements. Unfortunately, we are currently eight months behind on completed reimbursements.

The process for completing a reimbursement is extremely tedious, time-consuming, and mentally taxing. While an entry-level Guide is able to set up a reimbursement, only a GM is able to finalize the reimbursement and summon the item back onto a character. Our two active GM's are slammed with their real life jobs and adult responsibilities, and when they are finally able to squeeze out some free time to help on P99, there's about a thousand other GM-specific needs that require their attention. Reimbursement types are not distinguished either, someone who requests their 5 Spider Silks and another player who wants their Warrior Epic back hold the same priority. I will explain the exact process for processing reimbursements in greater detail below.

This bottleneck is well known to CSR and we're looking at ways to alleviate it. Part of that is something the players can help with. Two things in particular, first, when submitting a reimbursement request in the future consider the following:

How easily could I reacquire this item(s)?
How valuable or rare is this item(s)?
Was this a server glitch or a mistake I made?

Second: Read. The. Quest. More than once! This will prevent 98% of quest failures. There are loads of online resources for double checking quest steps alongside fellow players who have completed the quest before.

If you feel your reimbursement request is appropriate, this is the process for staff to resummon your item(s):

Quote:

Generally a Guide will investigate by looking through logs to verify all claims. Did what the player stated happened, actually happen? If so, does that it falls within our reimbursement policies. If it does, the Guide will format the post with information like server, account #, char #, item #, a link to the trade logs, etc.

Once that’s done, someone with GM access will double check to make sure all the information is there and the reimbursement policies are adhered to. If those boxes are not checked, the GM will request that information and move on. If it's all there, a GM logs into the game with the reimbursement threads up on a second monitor, and P99 on their primary. If the character is offline, the GM will log onto the character (loading screen), complete the item summon, then swap back to their GM toon (loading screen). To summon an item, they manually search for the item #, then type out a #restore command which includes the account and/or character #, the quantity, and item #. Then, they respond to the reimbursement post, update the CSR logs, create a GM item summon log, and close the post player's initial forum post.

That’s for one item. For one player. About half of our reimbursements have multiple items. As I write this post, there are 503 reimbursements in the queue.

We hope this alleviates any confusion and frustration regarding our long item reimbursement queue. We very much appreciate your continued patience and understanding and hope we can implement changes on our end to expedite the process.

Best of luck, and happy hunting!

Senior Guide Blistig